Speaking with several mohels about how the coronavirus has affected their work, Menachem Wecker found that the answers vary:

Avraham Rappaport, an Orthodox rabbi who also runs a Columbia, Maryland, financial-services company, typically performed five to seven circumcisions a week. Since mid-March, that number has soared to ten to fifteen weekly, which he believes is mostly due to restrictions on elective surgery related to the coronavirus pandemic.

But other mohels have different experiences. April Rubin, a Washington, DC-based obstetrician and gynecologist who trained as a mohelet in the Conservative movement, has seen relatively constant volume in the past three months. . . . “I am aware of several couples who have chosen to forgo the traditional ceremony and opt instead for a medical circumcision in the hospital prior to discharge after birth,” she said.

Eliezer Lawrence, an Orthodox rabbi and also a Manhattan mohel, and dozens of colleagues worldwide in a mohel group of which he is a part, have seen a reduction in circumcisions of late. In Lawrence’s view, some families have forgone a bris for a secular circumcision in the hospital to avoid the risk of having a mohel come to the house. “It is one of the last almost universally practiced things of the Jewish people,” he said. “We mark a generation of catastrophe in Judaism by the number who went uncircumcised.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.